1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for the handling of documents. More particularly the present invention relates to a system and method for the filing, retrieving, verifying, notarizing, translating, exchanging and updating of documents and other forms of information through the use of two-dimensional machine readable image codes. Furthermore, the present invention relates to a system and method for the handling of documents by encoding a document including text, picture, document format and the processing instructions using machine readable image codes affixed or produced on the document itself.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Any office, medical facility, business or the like is responsible for and by its nature generates and must maintain in an orderly fashion (as required both by the efficient operation of such entity as well as, in some case, by law) an ever increasing amount of documents. These documents must be maintained in an accurate and easy to retrieve and verify fashion. In addition, these documents must be updateable and updated without the introduction of errors.
Systems and devices to handle such documents, known in the art, suffer from several defects, not the least of which is human intervention in filing, retrieving, updating and otherwise processing a document. In addition, even when the handling system incorporates a computer, the known systems still require human input and modification of documents, a central database accessible by all users of the system (remote or "on site") and may require large physical storage capacity for the document generated by such a system.
Furthermore, as is known in the art, there are two key technologies to automate the document processing: one is the technology of how to store documents on a computer, and the other is the technology of how to transform a human readable document into machine readable format.
Regarding the first technology, the most popular prior art is the Document Imaging System. Such systems treats all documents as images, after scanning in the documents, the documents are stored in image forms. In order to store the images for later reference, the operator needs to key in an ID number, abstract, and/or other annotation. The document stored in such system cannot be edited or translated easily due to the nature of image format.
The second technology includes two most popular methods: one is Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the other is one dimensional bar-code. The OCR transforms the human readable characters into ASCII code. This method suffers two serious problems. The recognition rate is still not high enough [usually at 96-98%; this is not high enough for recognizing a blood type or money/bank transaction]. In addition, OCR based systems cannot handle the document format problem. Furthermore, although the one dimensional bar-code method has much lower error rate (about 0.01%), it can only handle few characters per code. This kind of capacity is not enough for document storage.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system and method which reduces and/or eliminates manual modification, including and/or filing of documents.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a system and method that is easy to use and operate and requires little operator involvement.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a system for recall and review of documents stored in said system.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a document identifying system.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a system for relating documents to an identified entity.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a system which provides for document translation, notarization and verification.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a system which provides for efficient document exchange (electronics or otherwise).
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a system which provides for document encryption.
Further objects and advantages of the present invention shall become apparent from the following specification taken in conjunction with the attached drawings.